PETER USTINOV, 82

New York Times News ServiceCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Peter Ustinov, the hair-trigger wit with the avuncular charm whose 60-year career amounted to a series of star turns as actor, playwright, novelist, director and raconteur, died Sunday at a clinic near his home in Bursins, Switzerland. He was 82.

Mr. Ustinov suffered for years from the effects of diabetes and, more recently, a weakened heart. His death was announced by Leon Davico, a friend and former spokesman for UNICEF, for which Mr. Ustinov worked for many years.

Mr. Ustinov, a cosmopolitan 6-footer whose ancestors were prominent in czarist Russia, was a prodigy who began mimicking his parents' guests at the age of 2. He wrote his first play, "House of Regrets," in his teens; it opened in London to glowing reviews when he was 21.

As an actor Mr. Ustinov won international stardom as a languid, quirky Nero in the 1951 sword-and-sandal epic "Quo Vadis?" He gained increasing stature by playing sly rogues and became one of the few character actors to hold star status for decades, adjusting easily to movies, plays, broadcast roles and talk shows, which he enlivened with hilarious imitations and pungent one-liners.

He won two supporting-actor Academy Awards, one for his portrayal of a shrewd slave dealer in "Spartacus" in 1960, the other for his role as a clumsy jewel thief in "Topkapi" in 1964. He received three Emmys for television performances: in the title role of "The Life of Samuel Johnson" in 1958, as Socrates in "Barefoot in Athens" in 1966 and as a rural shopkeeper who gains compassion from a youngster in "A Storm in Summer" in 1970. He won a Grammy for narrating Sergey Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf."

His more than two dozen plays included two spoofs of the Cold War. One, "The Love of Four Colonels," won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the best play of 1953, and the second, "Romanoff and Juliet," received the British Critics' Best Play award for 1956.

His greatest film achievement was his co-adaptation, direction, production and performance in the 1962 film "Billy Budd," Herman Melville's nautical allegory on good and evil.

On television Mr. Ustinov narrated many fantasy, historical and science programs and supplied a multiplicity of voices in several of them.

Among Mr. Ustinov's novels were "The Loser" (1960) and "Krumnagel" (1971); his short stories included "Add a Dash of Pity" (1959) and "The Frontiers of the Sea" (1966). Other writings were "My Russia" (1983), "Peter Ustinov in Russia" (1988) and a 1977 memoir, "Dear Me."

The entertainer maintained a frenetic professional pace. Asked to explain his abhorrence of retirement, he replied, "I've always considered life to be much more of a marathon than a sprint."

Peter Alexander Ustinov was born April 16, 1921, in London, the only child of Iona Ustinov, a journalist, and the former Nadia Benois, a painter. Both parents were half-Russian.

Mr. Ustinov attended the private Westminster School in London until he was 16, when he began studying acting with Michel Saint-Denis at the London Theater Studio. Within two years he made his stage debut.

For more than 20 years, Mr. Ustinov was an unpaid roving ambassador for the United Nations Children's Fund. He had varying command of eight languages.

He was married three times and is survived by his four children and his third wife.

When he was knighted by the queen of England in 1990, his main worry was how to reply to the invitation from Buckingham Palace.

Recounting his concern, he said: "The invitation said, `Delete whichever is inapplicable: I can kneel; I cannot kneel.' But there was nothing for those who can kneel but not get up."